Movies & TV

NEW YORK >> The Stephen King adaptation “It” continues to scare up record ticket sales, taking in an estimated $60 million in its second week and leaving a paltry $7.5 million for Darren Aronofsky’s audacious genre-bending psychological thriller “mother!” New Line and Warner Bros.

Sunday night’s 69th Primetime Emmy Awards reflected the diversity of the television landscape as well as the current political climate. Hosted by Stephen Colbert from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, the TV awards show also highlighted the work of women in the medium.

LOS ANGELES >> ‘It’ is a hit. The Stephen King adaptation from New Line and Warner Bros. shattered records over the weekend earning $117.2 million from 4,103 locations according to studio estimates on Sunday.

Colin Trevorrow will no longer be directing the ninth “Star Wars” movie, according to a statement on a Lucasfilm website. “Lucasfilm and Colin Trevorrow have mutually chosen to part ways on “Star Wars: Episode IX,” the message that appeared on

LOS ANGELES >> With no new wide releases, Hollywood basically took the Labor Day weekend off and put an end to what’s expected to be the lowest earning summer movie going season since 2006 — the last time the industry saw a sub-$4 billion summer.

With all the television shows and movies streaming in September, there’s plenty to choose from. Like Jerry Seinfeld, for instance. Named the highest paid comedian of 2017 by Forbes, he’s obviously still doing something right.

NEW YORK >> Hollywood effectively took the weekend off, resulting in one of the most dismal box-office results in 16 years. An already slow August came to a screeching halt at the multiplex, where no major new releases were unveiled.

As we are talking about her new series, “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” airing next month on Sundance, Gwendoline Christie says she was attracted to the role of a police officer because “I really wanted to play something that was totally different from what I am known for playing on television.

Another superhero series, you sigh, but Amazon’s “The Tick” takes its own droll, strange journey to make it stand out. First, it is more about the sidekick than the blue-outfitted crime fighter named after a small pesky arachnid.

It might take a medicinal brownie or two to really enjoy the new Netflix comedy “Disjointed.” Starring Kathy Bates as Ruth Whitefeather Feldman, the owner of a Los Angeles cannabis shop known as Ruth’s Alternative Caring, she’s a lifelong advocate for use of the weed.

NEW YORK >> The “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle: Creation” scared up an estimated $35 million in North American theaters over the weekend, making it easily the top film and giving the lagging August box office a shot in the arm.

NEW YORK >> After a decade of development and several postponements, the long-awaited Stephen King adaptation “The Dark Tower” debuted with an estimated $19.5 million in North American ticket sales, narrowly edging out the two-week leader “Dunkirk.

Be warned that the Audience Network’s “Mr. Mercedes” — adapted from the Stephen King thriller — starts with a horrendous incident. It’s 2009, and a crowd of the unemployed, including a young mother and her baby, is waiting in the predawn hours to get into an Ohio job fair.

A decade ago, before John Ridley created the critically acclaimed TV series “America Crime,” before he won an Oscar for the screenplay for “12 Years a Slave,” Ridley wrote a limited-run graphic novel, “The American Way,” which combined many of his interests — history, race, and now a team of superheroes — in one thought-provoking and entertaining package.

Just like in the alien abduction cases FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate, there’s some missing time between the film, “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” and the 2016 television miniseries revival.

The sounds on a Woodland Hills street will never be the same, now that June Foray is gone. The legendary voice actress died Wednesday at her home in Woodland Hills. She was 99. If you’ve ever watched the animated “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” or heard Granny in a Warner Bros.

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles was not easy. It was especially challenging for Brandon Jackson and his brother. “Everyone was trying to be hard, and here we were,” laughed Jackson, a Navy corpsman with 21 years service who grew up in the troubled section of Los Angeles in the 1990s and who currently lives in Murrieta.

In the line where a few thousand people were going to camp out all night on Thursday — the goal being to get into the big panels like “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead” on Friday — Akash Solomon stood out for the way excitement overcame exhaustion.

The great cat moves silently through the Griffith Park night, defying the odds by staying alive. It’s amazing that the mountain lion we know as P-22, named that way because he was the 22nd puma identified by Santa Monica Mountains National Park Service biologists, came to this urban-adjacent park.

LOS ANGELES >> The Minions are still a box office force and original stories are scoring big, but not the R-rated comedy — even with Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler behind it. Studio estimates on Sunday say that Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Despicable Me 3” earned $75.

There’s so much to see at Comic-Con International in San Diego, but one thing to add to your to-do list should be sitting in on some of the television panels. We’ve looked over all the offerings that have been released so far and here’s our top six picks for each day of the convention: Thursday July 20 • Teen Titans Go: (Cartoon Network) Voice cast members Greg Cipes, Tara Strong and Scott Menville and producers Michael Jelenic, Aaron Horvath and Pete Michail, 10-11 a.

NEW YORK >> The hulking machines of “Transformers” are no longer box-office behemoths in North America. But they’re still big in China. Michael Bay’s “Transformers: The Last Knight,” the fifth installment in the Hasbro series, scored a franchise-low domestic debut with an estimated $43.

Rom com. Sitcom. Disease of the week. Stand-up comedy backstage drama. My wacky immigrant parents. “The Big Sick” lives in all of these benighted genres and grows out of them. Thankfully, the often slick, just occasionally slack “Sick” is first and foremost an autobiography, and while it’s been designed to deliver maximum laughs and emotion, a quirky authenticity hovers over even its most manipulative moments.

The sci-fi action film “Life,” directed by Daniel Espinosa (“Safe House”), is set on the International Space Station. After a probe digs up a sample of Mars for analysis, there’s excitement about the possibility that this may be the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

FX’s “Atlanta” and Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” led the nominations for the 2017 Television Critics Association Awards announced Monday. Each series received four nominations, including for Program of the Year, and both programs are expected to garner several Emmy nominations when they are announced July 13.